Tropical Foods ‘hybrid’ market grows, retains customer base

The new Tropical Foods store is a gleaming addition to Melnea Cass Boulevard.

Tropical Foods has been a Dudley Square mainstay for four decades, and third generation owners Ronn Garry Jr. and Randy Garry hope the supermarket’s brand new store — opened just this week near the corner of Washington Street and Melnea Cass Boulevard — will cement the ethnic food market trendsetter in Roxbury for many more decades to come.

While Tropical Foods, which was originally called El Platanero when it was opened in 1974 in Dudley Square, has become famous for its selection of ethnic foods, the new store is similar to other modern supermarkets with a broader selection of food.

Ronn Garry Jr. calls the new Tropical Foods a “hybrid.” The store’s slogan is, after all, “The Supermarket for Everyone,” and the new location will allow the store to deliver on this promise.

“It is ethnic, but is it also now modern and conventional,” Garry said.

According to Garry, it was a necessary move to expand Tropical Foods’ offerings. It is the same choice many independent grocery stores must now mull in the face of competition from large brands such as Star Market, Whole Foods and Walmart.

Garry said he has watched other independent stores not make the leap and fail and he did not want Tropical Foods to suffer the same fate.

“We were given a choice — either grow or die,” he said. “To compete in today’s world we knew we needed a bigger store.”

The new Tropical Foods store is just around the corner from the original location, but it is worlds away in terms of size and modernity. The old store was just 8,500 square feet. The new store is 21,000 square feet.

With the expansion comes the addition of thousands of new items to the shelves, Garry said.

Some of the major differences are a meat counter with 80–100 meat items, a deli, a fresh fish counter and a bakery. The new Tropical Foods also has a greatly expanded produce section with as many as 150 new items and a wider array of organic products in all food categories.

But you can bet Tropical Foods will still offer the ethnic foods — such as curries, rice, beans and other specialties from around the world — that have given the market a loyal customer base.

Growing pains

Garry said it was very important to recognize his loyal customers, and he believes the new location retains the comfort and character of the old store, just with more space.

“Our existing customers know we built it for them,” he said.

Only it is more than that. It is about offering the kind of all-in-one grocery store that people have come to expect.

The owners of Tropical Foods had little doubt the old location could continue to attract customers looking for the ethnic offerings that cannot be found anywhere else, but they also knew they were losing some customers to the convenience of big-box supermarkets.

Garry experienced this first hand when he was doing research on expansion while visiting large supermarkets in Boston. While making the rounds he saw former customers that he knew from Tropical Foods. He asked them why they no longer shopped there and chose larger stores farther away. The answer was always the same — they wanted to shop at a bigger store with more variety, and they wanted to make just one trip, not have to go to one store for ethnic food and another store for more typical fare.

This kind of feedback solidified the decision to build a new store.

“We saw that there were customers that left and we want to get those customers back,” Garry said.

The new Tropical Foods location broke ground in January 2014, less than a month after the financing for the project was finalized. Madison Park Development Corporation partnered with Tropical Foods to oversee the project. Madison Park also agreed to buy the old Tropical Foods location, helping add capital to the new store project. The land the new store is on is owned by the city and the state, but Tropical Foods has a 99-year lease on the property.

Cuban native Pastor Medina opened the original El Platanero store in Dudley Square in the early 1970s. In 1988, Medina sold the store to his son-in-law, Ronn Garry Sr., who named it Tropical Foods. Ronn Garry Jr. and Randy Garry bought the store from their father in 2006.

Tropical Foods peaked at serving 13,000–14,000 customers per week at its old location. Garry estimates that the new store should see a 25–30 percent increase in customers per week compared to the old store’s numbers. Tropical Foods is also expanding from 70 employees to 100 employees, almost all of whom live in Boston and its neighborhoods.

The area has been craving a supermarket option and the new Tropical Foods can very likely satisfy much of this demand.

“We are happy to sort of invest back into the community,” Garry said.

He hopes the new Tropical Foods will become the same kind of supermarket landmark for a whole new base of customers as the old store was for its long-time, ethnic-food patrons.